1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a computer programs having a plurality of inputs, outputs, options and modes of operation or invocation. More specifically, the invention relates to the functions of invocation, control and monitoring of such programs in an interactive environment.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A variety of operating systems, applications programs and shells currently exist for use with computers. Because of the diversity of operating systems and programs, a user must normally become familiar with the specific functions, inputs outputs and options of each of the systems and the programs in order to use such programs proficiently. Unfortunately, in many cases, systems and programs have evolved over time to have features which are defined in a particular manner more for historical reasons than for consistency or ease of use. With the proliferation of several operating systems and local area network environments, the typical user is exposed to a great variety of operating systems and applications programs. Each such operating system and application may have its own distinct requirements. The learning of these requirements, particularly for the occasional user, can be extremely burdensome and may well dissuade a user from learning the full features of a program.
Several different common environments exist for invoking programs from a shell program or "process." As used herein and in the related arts, a "process" is the term used to identify programmed functions executable on a computer. Among the better known shells are the "windowing" environment develop by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center, the Apple Lisa and Apple MacIntosh environment, Microsoft Windows, QuarterDeck DeskView, IBM Presentation Manager, Digital Equipment Corporation DECOffice, the SUN/Unix shell environment and others. The invocation procedures of processes or programs under each of these shells, however, is generally limited. Most involve execution of a command line argument with the option to add, by manual typing, one or more input arguments. Whatever error checking is conducted is typically based on the error checking and correction capabilities of the program to be invoked, each of which may be unique to the program to be invoked.
What is needed is a more sophisticated mechanism for managing application programs which takes better advantage of the available interactive environment of modern computer technology, as well as for reducing the level of arcane knowledge required of a user to operate a computer with specialized computer programs.